Qur images of science vastly affect the relationship between science and society, according to an eminent physicist-philosopher. See page four.
CAPSULE American scientists seek answers to the need for low-cost power through devices which convert heat directly into electricity. See page forty-four.
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KRISHNA
PLAYING
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CONTENTS 4
THE FALSE IMAGES by Gerald Holtan
9
WHAT I SAW by Paul Almasy
12 14 16 18
BACHAN
SURPRISED
SINGH
OF DEMOCRACY
A WOMAN'S
DR. SEUSS: THE by Olga Arnold
ME
DAMAN
THE RESOURCES by Charles Frankel FROM
OF SCIENCE
VIEW
APOSTLE
OF JOYOUS
21
BELTSVILLE:
25
THE EXOTIC by V. S. Nanda
31 32
CRYOGENICS
34
AMERICAN POETRY by Karl Shapiro
38 40 42
WHAT
44
LOW
48
LIGHT FOR THE SIGHTLESS by Umesh G. Sirur
WHERE
SCIENCE
POETRY
NONSENSE
SERVES THE
OF RAJPUT
FARMER
PAINTING
ARMCHAIR PERSPECTIVE by John T. Reid
INDIA
MAKES
IN THE 20TH CENTURY
WILMA
RUN
IN AMERICA
AN INDIAN SCIENTIST by L. Bhattacharya COST
IN AMERICA
POWER
PUBLISHER
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the false
images of
science Can scientific activity become an integrated part of our culture?
by Gerald Holton
OF
the influences that shape man's actions, none is more powerful than the images we carry in our heads. Every subject is apt to invoke in our minds a specific image, made up of concrete information, misinformation, folklore, desire and prejudice. Thus, how people see themselves as a nation determines to a large extent how they will respond to any new challenge. The roles we play in our family life, particularly with respect to our children, depend greatly on what roles we assign ourselves in the society around us. In the same way, our images of science vastly affect the relationship between science and society. Practically, these images determine the level and the sources of financial support, the quality and quantity of instruction 4
SJ?an
offered, and the development of new scientists. The effects on professional morale and the goals scientists set for themselves-in short, on the scientists' image of their own work-are also considerable. But even more important is the role images play in deciding this urgent question: Can scientific activity be an integrated part of our culture, or will it be forced to develop independently? Right or wrong, ideas are powerful. Therein lies the chief danger of false images. Like bad grammar, bad images become dominant when they gain wide currency, and so undermine communication among thoughtful people. It is high time, therefore, to consider the prevailing public images of the role of science, using the most straightforward language possible.
March 1961 "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being."-Isaac Newton. Original painting for SPAN by S. Senroy.
o
00
00 00
DANGER ELECTRONIC
B'RAlN
Each person's image of science is different from the next, but all are composed of seven main elements. The first goes back to Plato and portrays science as a tonic with double benefits-science as pure thought helps the mind find truth, and science as power provides the tools for effective action. The main flaw in this image is that it omits a third vital aspect. Pure science allows us to understand the physical world and, through its applications, allows us to control and change that world. But science also has a mythopoeic function; that is, it generates an important part of our symbolic vocabulary and provides some of the metaphysical bases and philosophical orientations of our ideology. As a consequence, the methods of argument of science, its conceptions and its models, permeate first the intellectual life of the time, then the tenets and usages of everyday life. Our language of ideas, for example, owes a debt to the sciences of statics and hydraulics and the model of the solar system. These have furnished powerful analogies in many fields of study. Guiding ideas-such as conditions of equilibrium, centrifugal forces, conservation laws and the balance of energy or power, feedback, invariance or complementarity-enrich the general arsenal of imaginative tools of thought. All philosophies share with science the need to work with concepts such as space, time, quantity, matter, order, law, causality, verification, reality. A sound image of science must, therefore, embrace this third function, in addition to those referring to pure understanding and to practical applications. A second image of long standing is that of the scientist as iconoclast. Indeed, almost every major scientific advance, from the Copernican theory to the postulation of universal gravitation, from the discovery of the circulation of blood to the perfection of anaesthesia and vaccination, has been interpreted as a blow against religion. 7
span
March
1961
To some extent scicnce was pushed into this position by the ancient but dangerous tendency of some philosophers to prove the existence of God by pointing to problems which science could not solve at the time. Newton himself, who was deeply interested in theology, wrote, "It is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions (in the solar systems) .... This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." The same attitude governed thought concerning the earth's formation before the theory of geological evolution,the descent of man before the theory of biological evolution, and the origin of our galaxy before modern cosmology. This aspect of the conflict between science and religion results largely from a misunderstanding of both science and religion. To base one's religious belief on an estimate of what science can not do is as foolhardy as it is blasphemous. The reverse, the deification of the discoveries of science, is equally precarious, for scientific knowledgc continually grows, superseding its older formulations. The only secure foundation for religious belief, as all great religious leaders have taught, is neither the capacity nor the failure of man's imaginative mind, neither the powers nor the limits of his science-but faith. Today political overtones make a wider understanding of this problem both more urgent and more difficult. "Religious propaganda," a recent dispatch in Iron Curtain countries advised, must be counteracted by "scientific atheistic propaganda" distributed by local of political and sciensocieties "for the dissemination tific knowledge." The iconoclastic image of science has, however, other components not ascribable to an elementary misunderstanding of its functions. For example, the historian
Arnold Toynbee charges science and technology with usurping the place of religion as the main source of our new symbols. Neo-orthodox theologians call science the "self-estrangement" of man because it leads him into realms where no ultimate-that is, religiousconcerns prevail. But this image fails to recognize the multitude of influences that shape a culture-or a person. Neither to religion nor to science can one properly assign more than a limited part in the interplay between man's psychological and biological factors on one hand, and the opportunities and accidents of his history on the other. Moreover, to set science and religion at odds, to view them as nonintersecting paths, is to neglect the valuable possibilities of synthesis. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in Science and the Modern World, these are" the two strongest general forces, apart from the mere impulses of the various senses, which influence man .... [On their relationship] depends the future course of history." Whitehead held that" the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and deduction," are complementary rather than conflicting. The way many scientists and theologians state the issue today makes it seem as if we must choose between two normal and powerful drives. This is like forcing a child to choose between his father and his mother because they disagree on some matters. The next image of science sees it as a force which can invade, possess, pervert and destroy man. The stereotype is Anthime in Andre Gide's novel, Lafcadio's Adventures, the naturalist turned unbeliever. Anthime snarls at his niece who dares speak to him piously of religion, and retires angrily to his laboratory, where he weighs a group of starved rats, half of them partly blinded, the rest fully blinded, to find out which are dying faster. In the current version, the soulless, evil scientist is the mad researcher of science fiction, or the nuclear destroyer-immoral if he develops the weapons he is asked to develop, traitorous if he refuses. According to this view, scientific morality is inherently negative. It causes the arts to languish, it blights culture and, when applied to human affairs, leads to regimentation and to the impoverishment of life. In short, science is the serpent seducing us into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge -thereby dooming us. The fear behind this attitude is genuine, but not confined to science. It is also directed against writers, artists, philosophers, theologians-in fact, against all thinkers and innovators. Plato condemned the work of Homer for conducing to impiety and immorality, and the same charge still greets many an original work. Society has always found it hard to deal with creativity, innovation and new knowledge. And since science assures a particularly rapid, and therefore particularly disturbing, turnover of ideas, it remains a prime target of suspicion. Factors peculiar to our time intensify this suspicion. Progress in basic scientific knowledge, being confined to a minority of specialists, cannot by itself directly disturb society. But the discoveries of "pure" science now readily lend themselves to widespread exploitation through technology: Applications spread swiftly and widely. Thus we are in an inescapable dilemma-irresistibly tempted to reach for the fruits of science, yet deep inside aware that our biological and psychological metabolism may not be able to cope with this ever-increasing appetite. Probably the dilemma can no longer be resolved, and this increases the anxiety and confusion concerning science. A current symptom is the popular identification of science with the technology of superweapons. The missile is taking the place of the microscope as a symbol of modern science. All efforts to convince people that science itself can only give man knowledge about himself
and his environment, and occasionally a choice of actions. have been unavailing. The scientist as scientist can take little credit or responsibility either for the facts he discovers-for he did not create them-or for the uses made of his discoveries, for he generally is neither permitted nor specially fitted to make these decisions. They are controlled by considerations of ethics, economics, or politics, and therefore shaped by the values, fears and historical circumstances of the whole society. The last two views held that man is inherently good and science evil. Now we come to an image based on the opposite assumption; it expresses the fear that man cannot be trusted with scientific knowledge. He has survived despite his wickedness only because he lacked sufficiently destructive weapons; now he can immolate his world. Science, indirectly responsible for this new power, is here considered ethically neutral. But, like the sorcerer's apprentice, man can neither understand this tool nor control it. Unavoidably he will bring upon himself catastrophe, partly through his natural sinfulness and partly through his lust for power, of which the pursuit of knowledge is a manifestation. The fear inspired by this image also motivates the repeated demand for a moratorium on the pursuit of science. The most famous formulation was that of the Bishop of Ripon at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. We should all be better off, he contended, if every physical and chemical laboratory were closed for ten years, and the energy now directing them were turned to establishing the brotherhood of man. The suggestion is based on two misunderstandings. First, science is not an occupation that one can pursue or change at short notice, like working on an assembly line. The creative scientist does not have a free choice of action. He does not advance towards his new knowledge; rather knowledge advances towards him and overwhelms him. Even a superficial glance at the work of a Kepler, a Darwin or a Pasteur shows that the driving power of creativity is as strong and as sacred for the scientist as for the artist. Secondly, salvation cannot be considered a reward for ignorance. To survive and progress, man cannot know too much about his environment. The real price of new knowledge is the obligation knowledge imposes on all of us to assume responsibility for ourselves. It may yet turn out, paradoxically, that science will help to compel us at last to curb the aggressions that in the past were condoned and even glorified. Organized warfare and genocide are practices as old as recorded history. The exploitation of science now has so sharpened the knife edge on which civilization has always balanced that the main antagonists themselves recognize the eonrmity of the threat. Never before have even the war lords on both sides openly expressed fear of war. If man is inherently evil, Judgement Day is surely near. But if good exists in him, one can be more optimistic. The alternatives are so extreme and so obvious as to allow hope that the instinct of self-preservation will reinforce good sense and moral strength. Mankind has come to its experimentum crucis .• Gerald Holton, professor of physics at Harvard University, is active in three fields-physics, teaching and scholarly editing. Doctor Holton pursues experimental research on the properties of materials under high pressures; he teaches and writes in the fields of physics and the history and philosophy of science; and he is also editor-in-chief of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bol'II of Austrian parents, Doctor Holton is thirty-seven years old. This is the first of a series of two articles.
"This sunset view, taken fr0111a lighthouse, of downtown San Francisco had a special atmosphere. It was the picture of a big city with all the characteristics of a landscape, a combination of elements a photographer rarely finds."
What I SaUl
surprised
me
Photographs and Captions by PAUL ALMASY WHEN the noted European photographer, Paul Almasy, visited the United States for the first time, he decided to report his impressions in his own words and pictures as he travelled across the country from New York City to San Francisco. His recorded impressions of the cities, the buildings, parks, roads and people of the United States are presented in this picture story. Said Almasy: "No matter how much you have heard, seen or read about a country, you are bound to be greatly surprised when you visit it for the first time. "A European thinks that everything in America including life itself is bigger than in Europe. Whether they refer to dimensions or quantities, figures always seem to be enormous and amazing. We associate the United States with maximum achievements in technology and records of all kinds. However, my stay in New York,
a city that is the symbol for everything that is gigantic in American life, changed my idea about the United States considerably. "In this biggest city of the world, everything including the way of life is tailored according to the needs and habits of the average man-the little man, as he is referred to. "Skyscrapers, just as ordinary houses, generally are outward trappings only. Even in this rich city, millionaires are the exception rather than the rule, and certainly invisible.".
"On my trip through the United States, I was looking for typical American cities. I took pictures of skyscraper! (andfrom skyscrapers, below, looking down from Rockefeller Centre) and of dozens of other subjects and finally, after careful consideration, decided that this photo, left, of a new San Francisco home development was the l1wst informative of all. The great number of houses seemed to produce a certain rhythm and optical effect. In fact, the European concept of American cities is wrong. There may be skyscrapers in about a dozen cities, but America is /lot the world of skyscrapers, it is the world of private homes."
"The little Seventh Avenue garmellt worker, belm,;, pushing his clothes-rack through the street, represents to me the real New York at a hUll1anscale. These millions of little people make all of America much more hUlllan, more familiar, more pleasant and more appealing than the other America that Europeans think of as the country of millionaires and of miracles of technology."
•.This discussion, below, in Pershing Square, Los Angeles, reminded lIle of London's Hyde Park. A Negro woman complained about a social problem unknown to me, presenting her ideas with a stoic sense of hUlllour. Quite a few people in the crowd contradicted her arguments. But during the ha/fhour discussion, you could not hear a single excited word. There )\'as no dispute, 110 irritation The faces slwwed interest in the discussion and respect fOi el'erybody"s opinions. The whole scene radiated the healthy spirit of freedom of thought and opinion."'
"This little squirrel in the heart of America's hurried capital \l'as the biggest and most pleasant surprise 0/ my thirty years of world trarels. In the United States, there exists the closest tie between people and government. The Capitol, below, represents the citizen's ideal of freedom and democracy which he seeks to perpetuate. To Americans, Washington is a place of pilgrimage.-¡
BACHAN SINGH Daman is the spiritual leader of two thousand Sikhs in California's bountiful Central Valley farming region. Born in the Punjab fifty-seven years ago, Bachan Singh left India as a young man and settled in the Philippines where he became a priest and a merchant. When Bachan Singh Daman visited the Sikh Temple in Stockton, California, several years ago, the temple was without a priest. the former priest having recently died. The older men in the community remembered Bachan Singh's father, Labh Singh, who had been their spiritual leader twenty years before. After twenty-eight years in California, Labh Singh had returned to India in 1938. The community persuaded Bachan Singh to stay as the priest of their temple. As mentor of the Central Valley Sikhs, he maintains communication with far-away relatives and kindred groups. He visits scattered farmers and manages the hostel for retired men and visiting students which is maintained by the temple.
On the grounds of the Sikh Temple in Stockton, Cali/ofilia, Bachan Singh Dalllan talks with Pritpal Singh, left, a student at the College of the Pacific, and Kirpal Singh of Stockton College
Serving his religious traditions ill a new world, Bachan Sing!z Daman reads from the scriptures of his faith.
"We are happy here," the priest declares. "The integrity of our people is proved by the fact that the name Singh has become a character reference in this part of the United States." •
ABOVE: Proud of the ~'egetablesin his temple garden, the priest discusses the merits of his lettuce with Jawala Singh, a veteran resident of the temple's hostel for retired men and visiting students. LEFT: He visits members of the Sikh community over a wide area, stops to talk with Karam Singh, who has built a new home twenty-five miles from Stockton, and his helper Charanjit Singh.
From his office in the temple, Eachan Singh Daman maintains correspondence with all parts of the world.
BELOW:
T
HE democratic system, we believe, is built to manage the complex problems of our era. It is one that aims at the most important form of efficiency. And it puts its trust in the one place where trust must be placed-in the spirit, the talent, and the intelligence of its citizens. There is no alchemy that will make the problems of the contemporary world simpler than they are. Their solution depends, in every social system, on four essential conditions-on the quality of the men who occupy positions of leadership, on the information and resources available to them, on the circumstances in which they work, and on the support they receive from their fellow citizens. Examination of democracy from anyone of these viewpoints suggests that in its essentials it is built to manage complexity as well as any human arrangement can be. The quality of the individuals who occupy the positions of leadership in any system of government depends, in general, on the methods by which they are selected.
The Resources of Democracy by Charles Frankel Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
In practice this means that th.ey are selected by a competitive 'process that is governed by certain rules. Competition for leadership is not a distinguishing characteristic of democracy. It is an inevitable characteristic of any system of government. Rivalry, the struggle for power and authority, "politicking," go on in every societyopenly or surreptitiously, peacefully or violently, but rarely gently. Democracy is an effort to tame this competition and to turn it to constructive use. It is not competition, then, but the rules democracy employs to regulate this competition that differentiate it from other systems of government. Just as the rules of football make it likely that those with weight and speed will be outstanding and the rules of chess favour more strictly intellectual qualities, so the rules of the democratic process favour men of one kind and the rules of other systems of government favour men with different qualities. The democratic method of competition does not guarantee that men of humane intelligence and integrity will come to the fore. But it is more likely to
potL! 5 TAT
produce this result than methods of competition that depend on conspiracy, violence, and authoritarian claims to infallibility. The democratic process, furthermore, gives those who acquire the authority to govern an extraordinary The opportunity for a continuing liberal education. decisions that men make are determined in large part by the information that is available to them. When the problems with which a public official has to deal are complex, he needs information from many different quarters and he needs the chance to hear many different points of view. In the modem world the funnelling of information to those in key positions is an extraordinarily complex task. Where totalitarianism tends to clog the channels through which information flows, democracy tends to open them up. The evidence we have about the workings of the azi regime indicates that the difficulties of communication are doubled when subordinates in a hierarchy are fearful of extreme punishment for their mistakes or when they feed their superiors only the information their superiors want to hear. Democracy minimizes such dangers. In contrast, it provides the general conditions for the growth of informed intelligence. It provides liberty of thought and conscience and the chance for open debate. It makes it possible for men to exchange information freely and to criticize and amplify one another's beliefs. And it does something more. In a world in which problems are difficult, it diffuses power and decentralizes the decision-making process, thus permitting men to try different ideas simultaneously. It permits leadersh;p to arise in many parts of society. It gives energetic m(;n multiple chances to take responsibility and does not discourage them by insisting that all their efforts be controlled from one great centre. In other words, democracy refuses to make the most tempting and the most misleading assumption that can be made when problems are complex. This is the assumption that alI knowledge and good sense reside in a single, tightly-knit ruling group. A democratic system, in contrast, keeps its leaders under steady pressure. eedless to say, no social policy can please everybody, whether in a democracy or a dictatorship, and no government that has character and integrity of purpose will try to please everybody. But a democratic government is constantly hearing from those who are displeased. And if it makes its decisions on narrow grounds, if it ignores any considerable set of interests held by its citizens, the penalty is likely to be reasonably swift. Democracy is thus a method for keeping the leaders of a society steadily reminded that their problems are more complex than they may like to think. This does not make the life of those who govern easier but it helps the lives of those who are governed. Moreover, it gives to their lives a special quality. When a government has earnestly listened to the opposition and when it has made an honest effort to reach a consensus before determining its policies, the citizens who must execute these policies are less likely to feel that they are doing so under coercion. Their views have been asked and their dignity respected, and they can feel that the support they give their government is given freely. The issue is more than a question of practical efficiency. It is a question of attitude. Men who are attached to democracy speak of the complexity of presentday problems partly because they are aware that the impact of any social policy will vary from person to person. They recognize as well that in every society there are bound to be individuals who suffer from the irresponsibility, the cruelty, the indifference, or the ignorance of their felIows. They therefore propose to maintain a social
"The quality of the individuals who occupy the positions of leadership in any system of government depends on the methods by which they are selected."
order that gives these individuals the chance to speak up and fight back. For they cherish the variousness of human beings and the differences between them, and count this variousness-this complexity-the mark of a high civilization. And they prefer this vision of human life to the lure of simple solutions and the seductions of a master plan which solves all problems by ignoring the existence of most of them. In the end, the totalitarian method is not a method for dealing with complexity. It is a method by which the desperate, the impatient, or the ruthless can come to convince themselves that life is simpler than it reaIIy is; it is a method by which the weary can escape the need to think at all. When frustration accumulates in a society, it is intelligible that its members may be tempted to turn to such a method. But totalitarianism is not an answer to the question of complexity, it is a refusal to ask the question. The democratic method, in contrast, is for the confident and the toughminded. It does not promise that all problems can be solved; it relieves no one from the pain of thought or from the responsibility of facing as many facts and respecting as many human values as possible. But it accepts the difficulties of government for what they are, and it aims at a level of human achievement that is only possible when men face their difficulties squarely and overcome them honestly. Such a commitment, like any commitment, has its risks. Democracies, with their habits of prolonged public discussion, have often been thought, even by their friends, to be inefficient. This fear is bound to be more insistent when a democracy is faced by ruthlessly organized regimes. which seem to determine their policies with speed and to execute them with rigour. But speed, rigour, organization, and discipline are virtues only when the goals they serve are inteUigent. The arbitrary fixing and refixing of goals is surely a less adequate device for insuring intelligent policies than the more protracted and self-critical deliberative processes which democracy employs. Moreover, the human cost of forcing individuals to work towards the execution of purposes they do not share or high. Wherever such a cannot accept is notoriously policy has been attempted in the modem world, a large proportion of a society's resources has been spent on secret police, political prisons, propaganda, and party functionaries. Even in the narrowest terms, such methods are more wasteful than methods that place their faith in humane education, free communication, and the open competition of opposing groups. Moreover, if "efficiency" is construed to mean simply the capacity to attain a narrow set of purposes, then efficiency is not the only value that a democracy seeks. But if efficiency stands for an effort to produce the largest result for a given application of resources, then democracy does not suffer by comparis0n with any other system. For the democratic idea asks that a society measure the results it achieves by the extent to which it nourishes human rationality and human capacity for willing service to one's feIIows. A society guided by this idea believes that the intelligence and integrity of its citizens are its richest resources. It aims to find that intelligence wherever it is and to create a fluid society that will allow this intelligence to flow where it can be used. It tries to build its power, in short, on the power of its individual citizens, and it judges the efficiency of its various enterprises in these ultimate terms .•
T
HE airfield of the tropical island is peaceful and quiet in the early morning sun. A plane is being readied for flight. Several men and a tall, slim young woman climb aboard, and the plane streaks out over the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. The woman gazes intently out of the plane window. Occasionally she scribbles notes on a pad or ays a few words to her companions. A motion picture camera in the nose of the plane begins it steady hum. The woman, Dr. Joanne Malkus, is a meteorologist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She and her associates are a search party. Their quarry is the understanding of one of nature's most elusive offsprings-a cloud. Dr. Malkus is investigating tropical cumulus clouds. These tufted, billowy, cottony clouds are believed to be the most important cloud formation known. From them come thunderstorms, rain, and-most important-much of the energy that powers our atmosphere. To understand the life cycle of these clouds-bow they are formed and grow, and the role they play in the development of hurricanes-Joanne Malkus goes to the clouds themselves. With the instruments of modern technology, her laboratory is the sky. Why does a scientist pend so much time studying a phenomenon as fleeting as a cloud? Joanne Malku
Cloud Explorer
shows us. once more. how scientists are spurred by curiosity and a need to understand "how things work." Joanne Malkus' interest in weather developed by chance, while she was an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. At the time, eager to become an airplane pilot, she enrolled in a meteorology course. A basic knowledge of the subject was required for a license. "The subject fascinated me," she recalls, "especially the parts concerning the growth of clouds, and I decided to enter the University's institute of Meteorology." She received her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees, then took a leave of absence during World War II to serve as forecaster and instructor of student weather officials for the Chicago Weather Bureau. After the war, she returned to the university. There she earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1949. At the same time she joined the physics department of the lllinois Institute of Technology, where she persuaded the department to let her set up and teach a course in
meteorology. Since 1951 she has been with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as a marine meteorologist-with time out for a year spent as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, England. At Woods Hole she has directed a number of research projects dealing with tropical weather. It is in the tropical regions of the earth that mo t of our weather is born, and it is there that the cumulus clouds Joanne Malkus studies are formed. To understand these clouds, one must first know something about their formation. Actually, some of the cloud-forming processes are similar to those taking place in a steaming cup of coffee. "There is heat and moisture in a coffee cup," Dr. Malkus explains, "and because hot air rises we find forces in motion. The steam coming up from the coffee cup is water vapour which is being condensed into many tiny liquid water droplets. Something very similar to this is taking place over the tropical oceans, where, almost always, there is plenty of heat and moisture and air in motion. But here. instead of steam, we get clusters of cumulus clouds. How do these clouds form? The radiant energy of the sun beats down on the surface of the sea, starts to evaporate sea water, and warm, moist bubbles of air are formed. These rise. Some of them get up so high that they are able to expand, and cool sufficiently to condense and form small cloudlets. But how do clouds grow? Where do they get their energy? And why do some clouds remain tiny little things all their lives, while other clouds grow up to be great runaways?" Classical theories about the growth of cumulus clouds stated that they behaved as isolated "packages" of moist air. which rise without interference from surrounding drier air. However, studies sponsored by the U.S. Navy during World War II began to draw an entirely different picture of cloud formation. In the tropical regions, these investigation showed, a definite cloudforming layer extends from 2.000 feet to 7:000 feet above sea level. Above this region a stable layer of much drier air, called the "trade inversion," acts as a sort of lid. This inversion layer prevents the higher growth of clouds. However, most clouds stop growing far below the level of the trade inversion. If the classical theories were correct, there would be nothing to stop the cloud from growing until it met the inversion layer. Intrigued by these inconsistencies, Dr. Malkus and her associates made a number of trips to the Caribbean, to find out what actually does happen during cloud formation. They borrowed a PBY-6A aircraft from the U.S. avy and equipped the plane with very delicate instruments, to measure temperature and moisture content of a cloud and its surrounding air, turbulences inside the cloud, and the speed of the wind at various levels outside the cloud. A time-lapse motion picture camera took aerial photographs of cloud shapes. Even the aircraft itself served as a measuring device, recording by its bouncing motions the air currents in the cloud. The plane flew through the clouds five or six times at various levels, so that many measurements and photographs could be made. On some days they remained aloft as long as twelve hours. This was only the beginning of the task. After the group returned to woodsf;Hole,
the data had to be analyzed carefully. After months of work, the group was able to set forth a new theory of cloud formation. Instead of being isolated from the outside air, the scientists found that air inside the cloud is continually mixing with outside air. In fact, outside air is drawn into the growing cumulus. This outside air is much drier than the moist air inside the cloud. Since the energy source of a growing cloud is the heat released as the water vapour condenses, this dry air reduces the energy supply by reducing the moisture in the air-diluting the moist inner air. Based on these findings, the scientists have worked out a model of cumulus cloud behaviour and structure. Assuming that the cloud is moving in a given wind current whose velocity increases with elevation, this difference in wind velocity gives the cloud a slanting appearance. Air, drawn into the cloud on the side towards the wind, flows out on the other side. The upper part of the cloud, moving in the same direction as the wind, is moving more slowly because the air composing it has risen from more slowly travelling lower levels. Since the cloud grows on the side towards the wind and decays on the other side, it might be thought of as moving into the wind, rather than with it. In this view of cloud dynamics, a cumulus no longer drifts passively with the winds. It is in a continuously changing dynamic process of rapid growth and decay. Later studies by Dr. Malku strengthened this theory. How, then, do small clouds ever grow into the gigantic runaways associated with hurricanes? Joanne Malkus is now investigating this problem. There are some educated guesses. but a great deal of information is needed to complete the picture. "This is, I believe, a frontier in tropical meteorology and tropical storm research-the frontier we're trying to explore now," she says. In private life, Joanne Malkus is the wife of Dr. Willem V. R. Malkus. a theoretical physicist and oceanographer at Woods Hole. With their two sons, David and Steve, the Malkus' live in a lakefront home near Woods Hole. Her research trips and laboratory work frequently keep Joanne Malkus busy far into the night, but she manages to find time for home and family, makes her own clothes, and pursues her beloved banet dancing studies. Determined that her career will not interfere with the normal home life of her sons, she even manages to get the family off for sailing and camping trips in the summer and skiing vacations during the winter. Dr. Malkus very strongly deplores prejudices against women scientists. The argument that women desert their scientific careers to have families, she feels, is soundly contradicted by her own career. Intelligence and curiosity, she believes, should be encouraged wherever they are found. There will always be more frontiers for investigation than people to do the job .•
The author is a scientific researcha for the Columbia Broadcasting System and a writer of articles 011 sciellce alld scientists. This olle first appeared in Science World. (c) 1960 by Scholastic Magazines, Inc.
"T
HE apostle of joyous nonsense" is the affectionate title bestowed by friends and book-lovers on the American cartoonist, Theodor Geisel, who, under the pseudonym of "Dr. Seuss," has created a whole mythology of whimsical bugs and impertinent beasts. He is one of the United States' most popular creators of picture books for children. When puzzled interviewers ask him why, with his advanced education, he doesn't write books for adults, he lifts his brows. "Why write for adults? They're just obsolete children." Perhaps his most famous creation is Gerald McBoingBoing, who has appeared in motion-picture cartoons. Gerald is a little boy who converses in sound effects instead of words, expressing his deepest emotions with a hollow clang. Other fantasies are "The Drum-Tummied Snumm" and "Thidwick, the Big-hearted Moose." His animals owe much of their light-hearted charm to the fact that he rises airily above biology. "Ted never studied art or anatomy," explains his wife Helen. "He puts in joints where he thinks they should be." Consequently, lions can hump their backs as sinuously as snakes, and elephants can fold their knees as cosily as kittens.
goat. Later he complained that the finished goat looked more like a duck. So Geisel drew his conception of a duck, and the happy client said it was a perfect goat. Children are not bothered by a carping insistence on realism; they love the fantastic and whimsical and are delighted with the improvisations of Dr. Seuss. His picture books, consequently, have become standard fare for American children, and for small readers in other countries. His volumes have been translated into several foreign languages, including Japanese. His Cat in the Hat was published in 1956 by the Houghton-Miffiin Company as a supplementary school text for first-grade pupils, on the theory that a child's first attempts to read should be fut' for him, not a tedious chore. The book combines humorous drawings with simple verses which
While his drawings are especially dear to children, they are also in demand among manufacturers who want a humorous means of advertising their products. One advertising executive commissioned Geisel to draw a
Dr. SEUSS The Apostle of J oyous Nonsense by Olga Arnold
Dr. Seuss is almost as pleasantly mad as his drawings. His pipe has a small plant growing from it. His home is a zoo-keeper's nightmare of such unlikely beasts as the bluegreen abelard which he here regards with quizzical affection.
use only 223 basic words. The Cat in the Hat was so popular that Geisel wrote another book about him. The cast of other Dr. Seuss books includes Horton the LongSuffering Elephant, Mayzie the Lazy Bird, Yertle the Turtle, Thidwick the Moose, and a wide assortment of the most improbable animals. Geisel's education was not exactly the most orthodox for a cartoonist. He met his wife, then Helen Palmer, at Oxford University where he was studying English literature. He intended to get a Doctor of Philosophy degree so he could qualify to teach at his Alma Mater, Dartmouth College, in the United States. While listening to lectures he drew animals in his notebooks intsead of taking notes on Shakespeare. Helen so admired these impromptu sketches that she encouraged him to forsake the academic halls and devote his time to drawing. His family objected at first to his discarding scholarship and the comfortable life of a teacher for the uncertainties of free-lance art. However, his father took some responsibility for this decision-as commissioner of parks he had taken a great interest in the zoo and had inculcated upon young Ted a love for animals. Geisel's efforts to sell his sketches of knock-kneed bears and other improbable fauna were fruitless until 1927 when he sold a cartoon to the popular American weekly, The Saturday Evening Post. This so cheered him that he moved to New York City, sold a page of eggnogdrinking turtles to a humorous magazine and received a fee substantial enough to permit his marriage to Miss Palmer.
Thidwick, the big-hearted moose, finds that picking up one hitchhiker who invites another who invites another is carrying hospitality too farespecially when woodpeckers drill holes in his antlers where the squirrels may cache their nuts .
• cartoon he sold to the same magazine Another brought about his career in commercial advertising. The drawing concerned a sleepy knight who sheds his armour only to find a dragon crawling into his bed. He cries out in exasperation that he thought he had sprayed the whole castle with "Flit," a brand of insecticide. The sketch caught the eye of an advertising executive, Leland Stanford Briggs, who handled the publicity for Esso Standard Oil Company, producers of "Flit." He commissioned Geisel to do a series of cartoons, all of which had the slogan, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" (A parody of Sherlock Holmes's "Quick, Waston, the needle!") The phrase was picked up by the public ,was used on radio and stage, and became a slang synonym for emergencies. It also launched the first major advertising campaign to use humorous cartoons to capture attention. It was to amuse himself on a rough transatlantic crossing in 1937 that he began composing verses to the rhythm of the "Kungsholm's" engines. The beat of the jingles took powerful hold of his imagination. "My contract children's books," New York, instead crazy rhythm out
had nothing to prohibit my wntmg he said later. "When we docked in of going to a psychiatrist to get that of my head, I decided to illustrate
SJ!an This inspired juggling act is from Dr. Seuss' book The Cat in the Hat.
March 1961 19
the verSes for a children's book." He wrote And to 'Ehink That I Saw It on Mulberry St~eet, which caught the interest of Marshall McClintock, a Dartmouth classmate who was working for Vanguard Press. The book is now in its eleventh printing and is still in demand at book stores and libraries, though it now competes with more than a dozen other Seuss books. Thre6' of these are in prose, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, The King's Stilts, and Bartholomew and the Oobleck. They have often been compared to the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. But the favourite creation of Dr. Seuss' through the years has been Horton Hatches the Egg, the story of an aqliable elephant who tends the nest of Mayzie the Lazy Bird while she flits about socially and forgets him. He sits on the egg, unmoved by the ridicule of his friends or by storms which nearly freeze him or by, hunters who capture him. His loyalty is rewarded in an, amazing way-the fledgling has a trunk and big ears like' his. It is a new species, the Elephant Bird. Theodor Geisel draws some of his beloved, unbelievable crratures for a group of school children.
With such an off-beat genius as Geisel, Hollywood was inevitable. During World War II he won the Legion of Merit as an Army officer with Frank Capra's Educational Film Unit. Shortly after the war, he and his wife Helen wrote a screenplay, Designfor Death, about the rise and rule of the war lords in Japan. The picture won the 1947 award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the best feature-Iengili documentary. But real fame came when he created Gerald McBoingBoing, the gong-faced boy; winning the Academy award for the best animated cartoon, and placing his plaintive hero in the folklore of America. Ted and Helen Geisel have now deserted New York for a pleasant hilltop home in La Jolla, California, near San Diego. They are popular citizens of the community~ Ted serving on the town council and on the board of the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery: The creator of merry monsters is in private life quite a pleasant, normal person. As' one of his biographers, Robert Cahn, has said in The Saturday Evening Post, "His h~ir is cut regularly, his shoes are always shined, and he gives up his chair when ladies are standing." He is politely attentive to the "vords and opinions of others. He is tall and slim with graying dark hair and a sudden impish smile. The Geisel home was built around an old tower on the highest hill above La Jolla, commanding a beautiful view of the sea. He is incurably h03pitable and loves to have his labours interrupted by the arrival offriends. His more businesslike wife is his only protection against processions of visitors. She handles the dreary details of bookkeeping and pays all the bills, while still keeping a keen ear for rhythm and a lively appreciation of drawing. Though they have no actual children, the Geisels have an imaginary daughter, Chrysanthemum-Pearl, whom Ted invented to compete with the progeny of their . boastful friends. When some par~nt lauds the scholarship of his daughter or the athletic prowess of his son, Geisel counters with a descripti,)ri' of Chrysanthemum-Pearl who can make "a delicious oystet stew with chocolate frosting and flaming Roman candles." While the authors'of children's books. are sometimes regarded lightly by other literati, Geisel has had his share. of scholarly recognition. He was invited to the Dartmouth College commencement exercises in 1955 to be honoured by his Alma Mater. (..... ' "Theodor Seuss Geisel, 'creator of. fanciful beasts," the college president read fro~ a scroll,' "as Author and Artist, you single-handedly have stoOd as Saint George between a generation of parents and the demon dragon of exhausted children on a rainy day. You have stood these many years in the shadow of your learned friend, Dr. Seuss. But the time has come when the good doctor would want you to walk by his side as a full equal. Dartmouth therefore confers on you her Doctorate of Humane Letters." •
.•
Dr. Seuss models Horton the Elephant, a kind and patient character, who is easily capturedfor a circus while trying to hatch an egg for Mayzie, the lazy bird, who appears in the background above.
A Beltsville scientist examines the seedhead of an Australian grass, one of many strains imported for study and possible use in the United States.
BEL TSVI LLE ••• where science serves the farmer ONE
of the most fertile agricultural areas in the world is a tract of land near Beltsville, Maryland. It is the site of the United States Agricultural Experiment Centre and its crops are ideas-ideas which benefit everyone concerned with the problem of feeding a growing world population. In Beltsville's laboratories, greenhouses, barns and poultry houses and on its rolling pasture lands, the magic of science is applied to solving the problems of raising better foods more abundantly and of utilizing foods more effectively and efficiently for human nutrition. Even more important, Beltsville scientists are seeking fundamental knowledge about the mysteries of plant and animal growth upon which applied research in the future will be based .•
Dr. Henry M. Cathey, above, a Beltsville scientist, is learning how to control the shape of plants. In this experiment, he treated chrysanthemums with a new chemical, Amo-1618, to stunt their upward growth. This is one of thousands of explorations beyond the frontiers of agricultural science being conducted at the Beltsville Agricultural Experiment Centre, left, which comprises more thun eleven thousand acres. It is a gigantic laboratory where U.S. scientists seek altSwers to problems affecting farmers of today and tomorrow.
Apples sprayed with a pesticide whirl round and round as a solvent washes the residue off the skillS. Chemists then test the solution to determine whether the spray is both safe to use and deadly to insects. When new plant predators appear, Beltsville scientists are called upon to develop pesticides to control them. In the greenhouse opposite, plants from all parts of the world are grown in the search for nelv uses of common plants and for stronger strains.
Hatched from unfertilized eggs, these turkeys bear the genes of only one parent. The big tom IlIrkey is the first higher animal produced by only one parent ever to become a parent himself Dr. A1arlow V. Olson, shown with the tom, is conducting extensil'e breeding research with the poults of unmated hens.
Beltsville chemists are studying cholesterol from rats in an effort to learn how this fally alcohol affects aging ill humans.
The birth of the bull calf below, named SX-lOl, at Beltsville several years ago marked the first progress in a long cross-breeding experiment to combine the high milk-producing qualities of his Jersey mother and the heat tolerance of his Red Sindhi father.
Houseflies, fed measuri?d rations of milk by a laboratory assistant, are studied by Beltsville entomologists who have developed intricate techniques for investigating the minute organs offlies in an effort to learn why and how they develop resistance to insecticides.
A portrait head, Rajasthan, Jaipur, second half of eighteenth century.
New York's Asia House Exhibition m
Sherman E. Lee, Director of the Cleveland Museum, who organized the exhibition of Rajput painting held in Asia House, New York City.
EVERY nation takes natural pride in its own cultural heritage, but the boundaries of culture extend beyond national frontiers. It should be the pleasure and privilege of every man to acquaint himself with the history, art and literature of countries other than his own. Only thus can he have a true appreciation of the rich and varied total of world culture which humanity has inherited through the ages and which binds it together in spite of external differences. In the United States in recent years there has been increasing awareness and appreciation of Indian art. Improved communications and a rapidly broadening stream of Indo-American contacts, following India's political independence, have greatly stimulated interest in the indigenous art forms and traditions of Indian culture. Outstanding among exhibitions of Indian art in the United States was that of Rajput painting recently held in Asia House, New York City. It was organized by Sherman E. Lee, Director of the Cleveland (Ohio) Museum, and consisted of one hundred and ten paintings chosen from several American museums and private collections, and including several borrowed from British collections. It was the largest, most representative and most impressive display of Rajput art ever presented in the United States. Many of the paintings, particularly those from private collections, were exhibited for the first time. In his introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, Mr. Lee wrote: "It has always seemed strange to me that Rajput painting has not achieved a greater measure of recognition in the modern art world .... These paintings are bold in drawing, daring in colour. Many of their pictorial devices anticipate those of modern masters such as Matisse, Picasso and Nolde.
In a scene from Krishna Leela, Radlw, wishing to merge her identity with that of her divine lover, suggests that they cJwnge roles, she dressing in Krishna's garb. This painting belongs to the j\tfewar school of the mid-eighteenth celltury.
Rajput paintings are distinguished by a rare vitality and charm of style. They are, as a rule, miniatures of book size, intended for private albums of patrons. Their themes are inspired by ancient tales of the loves and adventures of kings and gods, and their treatment is often a unique blend of the earthy and the divine. The artists revel in such subjects as love in its many moods, change of seasons with varying moods of exuberance, gaiety or pensiveness, scenes of hunting and legends drawn from the epics. All these figured in the ew York exhibition, as did another favourite theme of Rajput painters-Krishna and Radha and their love. The exhibition continued for six weeks and was considered by Paul C. Sherbert, Executive Director of the Asia Society, "a tremendous success." The Asia Society is a young organization, having been founded in 1957. Its new Asia House, inaugurated last year, is a seven-storey glass and steel treasure-house for students and lovers of Asian culture. It provides galleries for art exhibitions, halls for music, dance, films and lectures, a library, and headquarters for the Asia Society.
RalllaYalw: Siege of Lanka, Punjab Hills, about 1720. Lent anonymously through the Cleveland Museum.
Photographs
by Joseph Pinto
A non-governmental agency, the Society is an example of voluntary, private initiative in the field of cultural affairs. Its guiding spirit is John D. Rockefeller III, a well-known American philanthropist. Asia House is his gift to the American public. He has been assisted by such outstanding scholars as Philip Talbot and by outstanding public figures, including singer Marian Anderson and Under-Secretary of State Chester Bowles, former Ambassador to India. The Society's activities are carefully planned, not to make newspaper headlines but to aid American educators in teaching about Asian countries and to encourage in many unobtrusive ways the cultural exchange between Asia and the United States. Its programme in the field of education has included sponsorship of summer institutes on Asia for high school teachers and the preparation of special teaching materials for secondary schools.
Ram Singh I of Kotah Pursuing a Rhinoceros, about 1700.
A number of American newspapers, magazines and art journals reviewed the Asia House exhibition of Rajput painting in laudatory terms, several published black and white and colour reproductions of selected paintings .•
George Montgomery of Asia House installed the exhibition of RajplIt art.
Milkmaids in a Forest, eighteenth century RajplItanG cloth.
New York has lately developed several museums and galleries-the newest is Asia House-which deal with highly circumscribed material, of, one Ivould expect, strictly limited appeal, and yet manage to make their exhibitions enormously popular, interesting and vivid. Showmanship is largely accountable for the feat, but another reason is that the public has been eagerly following artists in their tireless search for new ideas, and very often these "new" ideas have their origin in certain lesser-known artforms of the past .... One striking example of this ... is the recently sharpened awareness of the arts of India. But other factors contribute to what will undoubtedly be a large public response to the new Asia House exhibition of 110 Rajput paintings created in Northern India from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. These include the currently growing interest in Indian dancers, like Indrani, and in Indian music, as pel/ormed here by Ravi Shankar. Conversely, the exhibition's interest may also derive to a considerable extent from the fact that the art it presents is so different from what we've been accustomed lO. In an era when paintings grow larger and larger, to the point where they virtually envelop the observer, it is a delight to come upon miniatures like these Indian works. Influenced by the art of Persia, they're tiny in scale, and of such exquisite workmanship one must study them closely before they quite give themselves. But in these paintings there are also refinements of line and brushwork, nuances of tone, intensity of atmosphere that are quite at variance with present-day art, and immensely satisfying. In any case this is a perfumed and exotic art in which gods and princes disport themselves with lovely women, slay terrible demons, hunt for exquisitely graceful beasts that never existed outside the painter's imagination, wander in flowery meadows, bathe themselves in gently rippling rivers, and play at a never-ending game of love and gallantry.
Krishna and Radlw in a Rajput painting of the Kishangarh school, early eighteenth century.
SCIENTISTS expect that cryogenics-the science of working with metals and other natural elements at extremely cold temperatures, about 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (204 degrees Centigrade)-will lead to the development of much new knowledge, and of many new industrial and scientific processes and products. While it is still a relatively new and unexplored field, scientists in U.S. industry and in universities are already deeplyinterested in its extremely fascinating possibilities. By reducing the temperature of metals and elements to 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, it is possible to do many things with them that are impossible at room temperatures. At such low temperatures, the properties of materials change very radically. For instance, a rubber ball becomes brittle and shatters like a clay flower-pot. Liquefied air begins to boil like water. Lead that is pliable at room temperature becomes as resilient as a steel spring. Stainless steel tubing becomes easier to bend. Electric wire circuits that today fill a large room may soon be made to fit a container smaller than a bread-box. Gas that is now stored in a roomful of standard steel pressure bottles can be turned into a liquid and stored in a metal barrel as high as a man. To achieve the extraordinarily cold conditions required, the metals or other elements are subjected to the intense cold of liquid oxygen, hydrogen or other liquefied gases. The low temperature is maintained by keeping the substances surrounded with the cold gases. A great advantage of reducing materials to very low temperatures is that many of them have very little or even no resistance to electrical currents that are passed through them. As scientists say, they are "superconductive" as conductors of electrical currents. By using this extraordinary degree of superconductivity, it may be possible to make electrical switches with no moving parts, which are smaller than pinheads. Electric motors could approach maximum efficiency. The International Business Machines Corporation, one of the leaders in all types of electronic developments in the United States, is depositing thin films of lead and tin on thin pieces of glass, and then cooling them cryogenically to make them superconductive. The switching speed of this material is at least 50 times as fast as the fastest transistor. Another advantage is that such materials can be used to make electronic circuits of microscopic size. Scientists say that by using components of this kind, it would be possible to reduce present-day computers or "electronic brains" to the size of a matchbox. The first cryogenic products to be used commercially have been liquefied gases, which are used for tool cutting, welding, oxygen steelmaking, and similar industrial processes. These liquid gases provide two important advantages: they can be stored in a fraction of the space taken by unliquefied gases, and their cost may be lower. U.S. scientists foresee many new developments, based on the superconductivity and other properties of cryogenic materials. These include an electron microscope more effective than any previous ones, possibly permitting atoms to be seen; frictionless bearings made by suspending a cryogenic superconductor in space; electric motors that would be nearly lOOper cent efficient; and electronic computer components with no moving parts. The really important growth in the use of cryogenic materials for commercial and industrial purposes is still ahead. But dozens of leading U.S. electrical, electronic and research companies and organizations are now carrying on intensive research in this new field and preparing the way for many interesting and valuable future developments .•
CRYOGENICS the science of working with materials at extremely low temperatures A research engineer tests components of a new gyroscope which is intended to spin almost free of friction at very low temperatures.
Indian Art in America's Heartland
KANSAS City, Missouri, is just about in the middle of the United States-America's heartland. Eighty years ago, not even a singularly 'vvhimsical dreamer would have prophesied that Kansas City would be the home of one of America's most notable collections of Oriental and particularly Indian art, or that the city itself would become one of the more handsome metropolises in the United States.
In 1880, Kansas City, in the words of one of the state's distinguished journalists. William Allen White, " ... sprawled on a half dozen ugly yellow clay hills rising from the west bank of the Missouri River, a 'mean city; if there ever was one. Mud streets, wooden sidewalks covered with wooden awnings over the business thoroughfares that slouched or staggered towards the river; cribbed vice reeking and stinking through all the
north part of town ... a dozen railroads pouring thousands of Western immigrants into the Union Station every day-vigorous, hustling young men and their wives and children pressing into the great plains to take homesteads and grow up with the country; a few pioneering packing houses . . . the larcenous bark of the real estate vendor forever dinning into the consciousness of visitors .... " Into this rough, half-formed town, not far from the American frontier, came William Rockhill Nelson, a young man of thirty-nine years, to found a newspaper, the Kansas City Star. It was to become one of America's soundest, most honest and outstanding journals, honoured the world over by men who seriously deal with the world's news. Even more important, "Colonel" Nelson and his newspaper waged a continuous battle for decades to improve Kansas City, a campaign for a more abundant life for its citizens. His fight took various forms: to promote the construction of a new opera house; to clean up the city's notorious politics; to put modern trams in operation: to abolish filthy tenements; to organize assistance to the poor; and above all to spread through the city a system of spacious boulevards and green. flowering parks. According to all accounts. Nelson (1841-1915) was a sturdy and highly intelligent man; physically he was big in frame and flesh, jovial, hearty. Morally, he was honest, kind, optimistic-a man of ideals and bubbling charity. Like so many men of his generation he had led a varied and peripatetic life: as a boy in Indiana he was unruly and was sent to the strict University of 1 otre Dame to curb his rough-and-tumble habits. He lasted only two years there and then independently studied law. His restless nature, however, led him necessarily to try his hand at road-building. cotton-growing. railroad financing. local politics and finally journalism. The William Rockhill Nelson Caller)' of Art, Kansas eil)'. The bronze Dancing Siva, opposite, in Ihe gallery's colleclion, is /rom Tanjore and dates /rom the fourteenth century.
Oddly enough, in the heart of this "ruddy-faced, sq uare-shouldered, great-bodied," pioneer and activist (to quote his friend, White), William Rockhill Nelson, there flourished passionate love of beauty. During his crusading days in Kansas City, one ot his cherished goals was the creation of extensive parks and gardens where all the citizens could solace their souls with nature's loveliness. He founded and maintained for twenty years a municipal art gallery with a representative collection of great paintings. His true devotion to art and beauty was perhaps most evident after his death. Having amassed a considerable fortune, running into millions of dollars-honestly and intelligently earned, he bequeathed it, to found on the death of his wife or daughter an exceedingly handsome mu eum and endow it in perpetuity. Among its varied collections, its rich assortment of Indian antiquities is perhaps the most striking. The Nelson Museum is by no means the only centre of Indian art in the United States: The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with the late Ananda Coomaraswamy as its guiding spirit, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. and the Metropolitan in New York, possibly surpass it in volume of examples. But its collection is choice: graceful bronzes from South India which seem to lead the spirit back to ancient verities; a superb panel-sculpture in stone, "Shiva and Parvati with Nand i and Attendants (Harusnath, tenth century)" -a miracle of proportion and deep-felt fantasy; and many other recreations of India's old and fascinating culture. To me there is something of awe and wonderment about this story: gleaming Indian bronzes within sight of yellow bluffs which less than a century ago marked the edge or civilization in America; eager schoolchildren, sturdy with the blood of immigrant ancestors and American maize, peering appreciatively at the treasures of a culture ten thousand miles and centuries away; a monument of art for the common people, which grew from an honest newspaper with a wholesome conscience, owned and edited by a good-natured. stubborn idealist..
AMERICAN POETRY in the 20th century The coming of age of a national literature is an historical mystery
Karl Shapiro, American poet ami critic, has published several books of poetry ami has received many awards for his writing, includillg the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1945. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the U.S. Library of COllgress in 1947, ami from 1950-56 edited Poetry nwgazine. He is currently editor of the quarterly literary magazine Prairie Schooner and a professor of English at the University of Nebraska.
POETRY today is one of the most active arts in America and one that has made a name for itself throughout the world. A hundred years ago it was an exaggeration to speak of American poetry; our poetry was still colonial and, with a few exceptions, our poets followed the examples of British literary masters. Today European universities offer courses in American literature and in American poetry, a proof that the "colonial" psychology has disappeared from our literature. Many critics today even consider American poetry the leading poetry in the world; and while it may sound boastful for an American to say so, there is plenty of evidence that this is the case. The flowering of American poetry comes in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, though three of our leading poets, Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, belong to the past century. The coming of age of a truly national literature is always an historical mystery, and it is always a cause for international rejoicing. Poetry, the most sensitive of the literary arts, may even give its character to the nation and, in a real sense, help create the nation. Before there could be an American poetry there had to come into being an America which was more than an historical entity; and paradoxically this America could be brought into focus only by the genius of literature. It was Walt Whitman a century ago who enunciated the America which ever since has fed the imaginations of our poets34
Span
March 1961
for Whitman is our chief poet and our chief visionary. And it is against Whitman that some of our modern poets have expressed themselves, either out of disillusionment with modern man or in favour of some new vision of man. The great themes of Whitman are sounded in two lines: One's-Se/f I sing, a simple separate Person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. What Whitman felt to be unique about the American was the sense of individuality and personal independence. Never before in history had man been free from the past to such an extent. Whitman personified this individuality in his poetry and in his life. Yet equally precious to him was the word Democracy, which made this personal freedom possible. Whitman is therefore both a personal and a national poet, the poet of Oneself and the poet of the En Masse, a spiritual and a political voice in one. In order to write his poems he needed a new instrument of verse, something larger and freer than the traditional English short line which had dominated all poetry in English for almost a thousand years. It is Whitman who opened the poetic line and gave it the sweep it has in much modern poetry. Modem poetry is practically synonymous with experimentation. It begins in earnest shortly before World War I with an avowed aim of breaking with the
laws and mannerisms of the older literature. The poet had become form-ridden, paralyzed with tradition and precept. He had no choice but to break the moulds and begin all over again. The breaking of form became an art in itself, and many of the best modern American poems are exercises in fragmenting the old forms. Some of these are extremely witty and original, inventing new ways to use common words and themes. For instance, in this lyric of E. E. Cummings: Love more more more
is more thicker than forget thinner than recall seldom than a wave is wet frequent than to fall . . . .
After all the ages of love lyrics the modern poet tried to discover a fresh and contemporary mode for expressing the most traditional theme in literature. Cummings uses ungrammatical forms purposely: "more thicker" is a kind of primitive language for the proper form "thicker" ; he uses verbs as nouns ("forget" and "recall" in this poem mean "forgetfulness" and "memory") and so on. And instead of using the logical statement such as "love is not as common as we think" he inverts the whole logical process to say that love happens less often than watery waves. All of this, of course, is intended to be funny as well as meaningful. And while it has the stamp of the author upon it, this poem is rather typical of much recent American technique in verse. Modern poetry like modern painting-frequently with it-rebuilt the very foundations in collaboration of form. Instead of telling stories in verse or presenting the conventional images in the time-honoured logic of perspective and sequence of event, it tried to telescope past, present, and future into a single image. The object of such technique was not economy of form or spacesaving but a re-examination of the myths of the past that have meant so much to Western culture. In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, perhaps the central poem of the modern anthology, the ancient Greek seer Tiresias is introduced into a sordid modern bedroom scene, in this way providing a prophetic link between the deep past and our own world. In the Cantos of Ezra Pound any figure from the past, mythological or historical, may appear at any moment in any context. Once the modern reader is acquainted with this method the poetry becomes fairly clear. ot all 20th-century American poetry is experimental, however. The works of Robert Frost, for instance, are among the most honoured American poetry of our time; and they are all written in forms which belong to the older tradition of poetry in English. Recently Frost was given degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, a token perhaps of the still existing literary ties between English-speaking countries. But on the whole the new poetry continues to experiment with the possibilities of form, the idiom of American speech, the rhythms that belong to the urban world, and all the significant day-to-day events of our age. One of the most sensitive of the younger poets is Elizabeth Bishop. On the surface her poems are easy to read but her concentration on the exact image lends a startling patina to her style. Reading her poems carefully one actually visualizes in the way one does in looking at pictures. The pictures she gives are frequently surrealistic and the aim is often no more than to establish a relation between an object and the image it evokes. Looking at the sea from shallow water she sees an Assyrian chariot:
that bore sharp blades around its wheels. That chariot from Assyria went rolling down mechanically to take the warriors by the heels. A thousand warriors in the sea could not consider such a war as that the sea itself contrives but hasn't put in action yet. This morning's glitterings reveal the sea is "all a case of knives." Lying so close, they catch the sun. the spokes directed at the shin. The chariot front is blue and great There is no exoticism or dreaminess intended in this strange association; on the contrary, it is the frightful reality of the sea as a kind of eternal war machine that gives the poem its meaning. The precision of this kind of poetry derives partly from Marianne Moore, the chief living poetess of the United States and one who is famous for the minuteness of her observation and her almost scientific control of her medium. Image poetry tends towards a pure view of the art: one does not look for intellectual attitudes in modern poetry such as Elizabeth Bishop's or Marianne Moore's. But there is a large section of recent U.S. poetry which deals with ideas head-on, any and all ideas. One of the most perceptive poets of this group is Randall Jarrell, recently Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Jarrell is an intellectual and a satirist; the irony in his poems frequently cuts down to the bone of his theme. One of his best known short poems is the five-line epitaph on "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner":
but the sweat of pipes and glitter of glass. The people in his landscape are also like the things that grow: like a child he knows them by their feel and smell. In one of his poems he recalls his father as a kind of primeval giant: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was nOl easy •• You With Then Still
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beat time on my head a palm caked hard by dirt, waltzed me off to bed clinging to your shirt.
Of course, tlus it is a way of excited a good reversion to the standing man's
is not personal recollection as much as symbolizing life. Roethke's poetry has deal of interest because of its deliberate deep past of the self as a way of underrelation to the natural world.
One of our most celebrated poets who has begun to publish since World War II is Robert Lowell, a member of the famous New England family of writers and educators. This association has penetrated his poetry deeply. He sees not only his own past in the history of America, but the very meaning of our history in the achievements and failures of the leading New Englanders. The Puritan heritage throws a sombre shadow over his poems. The sufferings of the pioneer Americans were not only physical but spiritual, and Lowell creates the imagery of that suffering with a long, rich memory. He is also a fierce critic of materialism, like many of the best American poets, and lashes out like an Old Testament prophet in a verse that is reminiscent of Milton. His poems are hard to quote out of context, being written in the closest texture and loaded with historical allusion. Richard Eberhart, who was a naval officer during World War II, trie to understand man's future in term of his unbounded curiosity. Like many writers he considers the scientist as a kind of infant who has got hold of a box of matches, [n the poem "On Shooting Particles Beyond the World" he begins:
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters, When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. The poem was written during World War II while the poet was in the Air Force, It portrays the living creature, man, in a constant state of semi-consciousness, held in the grip of the monstrous impersonal force of authority. There is no particular "State" indicated except any absolutist State. Especially ironic is the image of the turret as a womb, the Hitlerian State as Mother, Many of Jarrell's poems deal with the plight of man in the modern stateridden world. He is typical of tbe young American poet in his concern for the fate of the defenceless individual. Another preoccupation of the newer American poets is psychological memory-digging back into the personal past to discover those symbols which have helped mould the personality. Theodore Roethke, who was the child of a horticulturist, draws his imagery from the greenhouse and greenhouse workers. As a mature poet he harks back to ~an almost prehistoric world of nature; he is a "nature poet" in a kind of scientific sense. He sees not only the inexorable creeping of roots and vines
On this day man's disgust is known Incipient before but now full blown With minor wars of major consequence, Duly building empirical delusions. Now this little creature in a rage Like new-born infant screaming compleat angler Objects to the whole globe itself And with a vicious lunge he throws Metal particles beyond the orbit of mankind. Beethoven shaking his fist at death, A giant dignity in human terms, Is nothing to this imbecile metalfury .... Then in the time-honoured he says:
manner
of prophetic
poetry
It is not intelligent to go too far. How he frets that he can't go too! And where will he be when he gets there, wherever there is? But Eberhart finishes ironically by saying that there may be some compensation for science after all. Man in space flaunts "his own out-cast state" as he throws his imperfections into the universe. There is the suggestion in the poem that man is taking revenge on ature for his own life of exile from Paradise. The poet, of course, doe not consider the world of gadgets and creature comforts a paradise, and these things he satirizes endlessly. These poets are perhaps
the best of a much
larger
group now writing in the United States. There are still younger groups emerging from the writing classes, universities, and cultural centres of America. Generally these newer poets can be split into two groups, the University poets and the self-styled Literary Underground. The first group represents the more traditional aspects of literature and the established institutions of family, religion, and education. Their poetry is formal, elegant, ritualistic, and derives its experience mostly from the resthetic sense. One expects them to write about pictures seen in art galleries, famous artists of the past, and so forth. They travel a great deal, really or mentally. Someone has dubbed them The Silent Generation because they appear to exist in the world of learning and resthetic sensibility and are not conscious of much else. The other group¡ is extremely noisy and makes a point of detaching itself from anything of an institutional nature. The poets in this camp consider themselves heirs to a world they do not want to understand. They make a fetish of "exile" from society; they refuse to put down roots anywhere; they claim no loyalties to anyone but themselves. Most of them are jazz enthusiasts and take to reciting their poems to the sound of trombones ana tomtoms. They have excited a good deal of journalistic comment in the United States but it is doubtful whether the more serious writers have any interest in their rather old-fashioned bohemianism. In both groups there is talent but no one poet of any significant stature has emerged from either. The points of departure in American poetry are still Whitman, in the nineteenth century, and Eliot in the twentieth, the one representing the American ideal of the greatness of man and the other the responsibility of man to the spiritual past. Between these two symbolic figures American poetry is polarized; and an immense literary activity takes place on the terrain between. Another New Englander is the poetess Isabella Gardner, who draws upon the female sensibility in recording the sensations of modern life. She sees a sloth in a zoo and remembers that Linnaeus said of it: "noise, frightful, tears pitiful." This strange animal, the "bungled one" as the poem says, looks inquiringly into the face of the visitor to the zoo and hangs by legs and arms to life inexorably upside down under branches in the zoo or in the subway under town.
The zoo in the modern city is a kind of bestiary: people go to the zoo to think about-people. The curious image of the sloth turning into the tired straphanging urban man in the subway is something of a shock. The poem begins with pity for the animal and ends with pity for man. Richard Wilbur, a younger poet of great wit and urbanity, also uses small life symbolically in his poetry. Cutting his lawn with a power mower he kills a toad. He does not sentimentalize about the little animal but recedes into the magical territory where frogs once had princely significance. The "wide and antique eyes" of the animal die slowly; the daylight itself becomes haggard as it watches "across the castrate lawn." There is no comment implied one way or the other about Man or Society or the Contemporary World: there is simply the meeting of man and toad, the accidental death and the presence of the machine; in short, an attempt to find
out the relationship between civilized man and his responsibility to life. The despised toad provides a good point of departure for this equation. Modern man is always being surprised by his own emotions about subhuman life: an extraordinary amount of modern poetry in all languages expresses itself through these small, apparently meaningless meetings and deaths. Frost writes about midges and moths and ants in the same way. The ants are too "departmentalized" for him, but the tiniest speck of life that shows a mind he smiles on in admiration. Many American poets of our time are impatient with symbolism and try to use poetry to express their relationship with history. Delmore Schwartz, evidently recollecting an old photograph, writes: The children of the Czar Played with a bouncing ball, In the May morning, in the Czar's garden, Tossing it back and forth .. While I ate a baked potato, Three thousand miles apart, In Brooklyn, in 1916, Aged two, irrational ....
Then he records that his grandfather coughed in the army of Nicholas and escaped to America. What he feels about the past is that he is his grandfather; the ball of the Czar's children is the world; the beauty of man is a cactus bloom; in short, that man is always tragically confronted by history .â&#x20AC;˘
Wilma Rudolph, triple gold medal winner in the 1960 Olympics, chats with classmates in front o[ the Student Union Building at Tennessee State College where she is a third-year student.
In the science laboratory, Wilma writes up
an experiment. She plans to enter elementary school teaching and, to help finance her education, works as a part-time secretar)'.
WHAT MAKES
WILMA
RUNt ...
a cripple
the speediest
at four,
woman
at twenty
in the world
The Tennessee Tigerbelles, famous U.S. women's track team"are shown after setting a world record of 44.4 seconds for the 4oo-meter relay at the 1960 Olympics.
Every day, for three summers, Gray drove his star athlete to Tennessee State College in Nashville, a distance of forty-five miles, to work out with Ed Temple. As a result, Wilma never lost a race in high school track competition. Wilma cannot explain her extraordinary ability. "I just run," she says. "I don't know why I run so fast." A good deal of the credit must go to Temple, who is responsible for the fine track programme at Tennessee State College, where Wilma is now a student. He has made his women's relay team the finest in the world. Like Wilma, the other members of the team seem immune to pressure under competition, a fact which was obvious to spectators at the 1960 Olympics. Wilma Rudolph is the fifth of eight children of an invalid father, now 73 years old, and a mother who does domestic work to support her family. The family also includes eleven children by her father's former marriage. WILMA GlodeCJ.nRudolph, a tall, slender girl from Clarksville, Tennessee, has been acclaimed the "speediest ",,:oman in the world" following her triple gold medal vIctories at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. After breaking her own world record in the 100meter dash, the 20-year-old sprinter calmly went on to win the 200-meter event and anchored the women's 400-meter relay team, the "Tigerbelles" of Tennessee State College, to a world record. Wilma's success as a sprinter is all the more remarkable because of a childhood illness. At the age of four she lost the use of one leg after an attack of double pneumonia and scarlet fever. For two years, once a week, Mrs. Rudolph wrapped her small child in a blanket and took her by bus to a Nashville, Tennessee clinic for treatment. At the end of two years, Wilma was fitted with specially constructed shoes which enabled her to learn to walk again. Whtm she was eleven years old, one of her brothers set up a basketball hoop in their back yard. After that it was basketball, basketball, basketball. Wilma's progress in learning to handle a basketball was remarkable. One day in Burt High School gymnasium, a skinny, 13-year-old girl stumbled over her feet, tripped on a basketball and landed in an eighty-nine-pound tangle at the coach's feet. "A skeeter," said Coach C. C. Gray, shaking his head. "You are a skeeter, all right. You're little, you're fast and you always get in my way." When asked why he called her skeeter, Gray replied, "I called her skeeter, short for mosquito, because she was always buzzing around." Skeeter got up and tried again, and within two years Wilma Rudolph became an All-State basketball star, scoring a total of 803 points in the 1955 Tennessee State Tournament, a record for the year. While she was playing in the tournam@nt, Wilma was "discovered" as a track prospect by Edward Temple, women's traek coach at Tennessee State College. Temple asked Gray to form a girls' track team at Burt High School. Gray did, and Wilma's career as a basketball player ended, for she suddenly learned that running was even more fun than basketball.
At the 1960 Olympics, Wilma won gold medals in the 100-meter and 20o-meter sprints and anchored the 400-mQter relay team.
In earlier years life was hard for the Rudolphs. Feeding and clothing nineteen children was no small task, but somehow they managed. Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph could give their children few material possessions, but they gave them something more precious-a desire to get an education and a will to do their best in every undertaking. Wilma is in her third year at Tennessee State College, and plans to become an elementary school teacher. She practices running an average of two hours a day and does part-time secretarial work to help pay her college expenses. When the news of Wilma's success at the Olympics reached her family and friends back in Clarksville, neighbours contributed money for Mrs. Rudolph to cable congratulations. The Mayor of the town proclaimed "Skeeter Rudolph Day" and Coach Gray, who untangled a skinny basketball player seven years ago, was overjoyed as he confided: "I'm coaching her 15-year-old sister Charlene. She's going to be even faster if that's possible.".
"Sport," according to India's track star Mary Leela Rao, "is a dynamic factor in moulding one's character, personality and determination-a l10thouse where one develops mental and physical qualities. Any athlete who has participated in competitive sports undergoes mental, physical and emotional strain. What is more, one learns to take it in the right spirit. You develop a sense of calmness and get to know yourself really well." Even as a serious student of public relations and journalism at San Jose University, California, Mary Leela continues to participate actively in sports. Under the world-famed coach Bud Winter she has done well at the University meets and has been honoured at the University's Banquet of Champions. Her performances have also earned her a ten-inch plaque from Sports Illustrated, a leading American sports magazine. Miss Rao was initiated into Alpha Phi Sorority in her first year at San Jose and was subsequently elected to the American ational Pan Hellenic Council and listed in the "Who's Who in the American Colleges and Universities:' Besides sports and studies Mary Leela has been active in civic affairs. She has lectured on India before citizens' groups and has given demonstrations of classical Indian dances. One such performance helped add to the funds of the Boys' Town in San Jose. For much of her success Mary Leela credits her father, who is also a distinguished figure in the world of sports. In the winter of 1955, Bud Wintcr. Associate Professor of Physical Education at San Jose State University, came to India to coach the Indian players for Olympics to be held in Melbourne. Australia, the following year. Winter was greatly impressed with Mary Leela's performance and she was selected to participate in the Melbourne Olympics.
As India's Commissioner-General for Economic Affairs, with headquarters in Washington, Mr. B. K. ehru is intimately concerned with the progress of Indian economic and industrial development plans. One of his main responsibilities is to assist with the enlistment of foreign economic assistance to India, and for this purpose he frequently tours the U.S .. Canada, the U.K. and other European countries. In the course of a recent speaking tour through the Western United States. Mr. Nehru addressed the annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce at Tucson, Arizona. and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. He also spoke at the Silver Anniversary of the Planned Parenthood League at Kansas City. Missouri. Referring to India's objective of an economic growth rate of five per cent per annum, M r. Nehru said that to attain this the nation needed an investment of the equi\alent of 50 billion dollars, of which only 40 billion could be raised within the country. Success in the effort would, however, make India self-dependent within a decade and safeguard her democracy. Mr. Nehru stated that there were many hopeful factors in India's economic struggle and she was tackling her many problems with calm determination, eschewing complacency on the one hand and hysteria on the other. Earlier, in a televised round-table discussion on "Democratic India and Economic Planning", organized by the Georgetown University Forum, Mr. Nehru made an assessment of U.S. contributions to Indian development. He estimated that, even excluding much of the value of food and commodity shipments, American assistance to India is "about fifty per cent" of the total foreign aid received by the country. He said that the understood India's problems "very United States much more than it used to and, indeed, more than most countries do."
A grand-nephew of Rabindranath Tagore is among the Indian scholars who are teaching in U.S. universities. He is Dr. N. G. D. Joardar, a part-time teacher at American University, Washington, who also serves as Director of Cultural Studies at the Koinonia Foundation near Baltimore, Maryland. Koinonia is a privately-endowed institution where American technicians and others going abroad study the social and humanitarian aspects of their work and the factual background to their particular overseas tasks. "At Koinonia," according to Dr. Joardar, "the great point is that we must strive continually for a world that will bring blessings for all ... without condemnation for the past that is filled with the mistakes of most of us." A teacher-philosopher who has travelled and studied widely, Dr. Joardar has devoted much of his time to explaining the Indian way of life to Americans and talking to Indians about American tradition and culture. While teaching a course on "The World's Great Books" at Johns Hopkins University's extension school, he incorporated into the course works by India's great philosophers and introduced a new series of lectures on "The Great Books of Asia." These innovations proved very popular and enrolment in his class rose from ten to ninety-five. MRS. SARLA SHARMA Mrs. Sarla Sharma, a prominent Delhi social welfare organizer, recently returned from a two-month tour of America sponsored by the U.S. Government. In the course of this tour-which took her to Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles and the new State of Hawaii-she had the opportunity of studying the U.S. government-administered social security system and the activities of several American voluntary organizations. Specific U.S. techniques and practices which attracted her were schemes of benefits for the aged, day care nurseries, centres for the care of retarded children and toy libraries. Day nurseries, by providing good care for children, help working mothers and also permit non-working mothers to perform voluntary welfare work. Toy libraries, in her opinion, serve a threefold purpose: they satisfy the child's desire for a variety of playthings, provide instmction for him and teach him his first lesson in responsibility by making him take care of others' property. In commenting on the role of American women in national life, Mrs. Sharma noted that many of them who did not need to work for a living, were quite willing to devote their time to social welfare activities. Mrs. Sharma is joint secretary of three social welfare Kalyan Samiti, Bal Sahyog and bodies in Delhi-Lok Kala Niketan. She is also a former President and Treasurer of the All-India Youth Congress, and is associated with various civic and cultural societies. She considered her visit to the United States a worthwhile and profitable experience.
Dr. Joardar was at one time associated with Lucknow University, and his wife, an American, was a professor at Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University and became an American citizen in 1953. His daughter, Sheila, the wife of Dr. Philip D. Swanson of Baltimore, is a resident doctor on the staff of Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine.
DR.'
Rabindra N. Ghose, an Indian scientist from Calcutta, and his present work as director of advanced study and development for Space Electronics Corporaticm in Glendale, California, since 1958, provide one more example of the disappearance of national boundaries on the frontier of research. Dr. Ghose came to the U.S. in 1951, obtained a master's degree at the University of Washington and the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. at Illinois. His interest in the field of communications technology led him to Space Electronics. The California Corporation, whose department of development and advanced study he is presently directing, is one of the pioneer companies dealing with the use of Earth currents or communication beneath the Earth's surface without benefit of wires. Recently, the corporation entered into a $130,000 contract with the U.S. Air Force for research, experimentation and development in long-range communications using Earth currents. Dr. Ghose, in a recent article in the Saturday Review, explained the basic principles involved. "It is the medium through which the information is conveyed," he notes, "that makes the big difference between Earth currents and radio broadcasts ... Earth currents are, in common with most of the other currents that govern human life, electromagnetic in nature. They are made up of waves, which behave similarly to radio waves. Unlike the waves that activate telephones and the telegraph, Earth .currents do not depend for transmission on material connections between transmitter and receiver." On how the effective range of Earth current communication is being extended in the corporation's experiments, Dr. Ghose's own words are: "We originate our signals from a transmitting station buried several hundred feet down in an abandoned borax mine in the Mojave desert. Our broadcasting antenna is a long horizontal wire, pointing in the direction of our receiver and running roughly parallel to the Earth's surface. We introduce power into the antenna,
Dr. Ghose chats with an associate at the entrance of Space Electronics Corporation, where he is in charge of research to develop the use of earth currents for wireless communication.
An Indian Scientist â&#x20AC;˘ In America explores a new field of communications via currents beneath the earth's surface.
While researching a problem in the laboratory library, Dr. Ghose is assisted by the Space Electronics' staff librarian.
With two associates, Dr. Ghose discusses a research problem, left, which he then explains in the form of an equation.
In the Space Electronics laboratory, Dr. Ghose supervises the rewiring of a test equipment panel.
thus creating an electromagnetic field around the wire. The field in turn generates electromagnetic waves, which travel to the desert floor directly overhead. As the waves pass out of the Earth's crust and encounter the air, they respond to the presence of the discontinuity and spread out along the ground. The waves propagate in all directions, but have a tendency to prefer the direction in which our underground antenna is pointing. "On its way from the antenna to the surface of the ground, the signal weakens at the same rate as it would if it moved through the ground directly to the point of reception. Once at the surface, however, the signal loses force at a much slower rate and the message arriving at
Readings of data on an experiment are checked by Dr. Ghose from a battery of oscilloscopes in the laboratory.
the receiver is about as strong as the transmitted signal." One advantage of Earth currents is that they are immune to some of the natural and artificial hazards which radio broadcasting is subject to. The electric storms that harry polar regions, for instance, do not affect Earth currents. Earth currents might also be used for various commercial purposes, such as the linking of control stations within a long pipeline. Purposes such as these cannot be so adequately served by a microwave radio linking. Dr. Ghose believes this communication system, towards the development of which he and his colleagues are working tirelessly, represents an important potential in the advancement of rapid communications .â&#x20AC;˘ span
March 1961
43
A device known as a thermo-electron engine, for converting heat directly into electricity, has been developed by u.s. scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inside the tube-like engine, above, are two metal plates surrounded by gas. Heat applied to one plate causes electrons to jump to the cold plate, producing usable quantities of electricity. It has no moving parts, requires little supervision and maintenance.
plentiful through
electricity at low cost direct conversion
N EARLY all countries in the world share one great need that is becoming more acute each year-plentiful electric power at low cost. The need, both today and tomorrow, is posed by the fact that populations are growing rapidly and costs of the world's dwindling fuel resources are increasing steadily. Today's expensive method of generating electricity acts as a barrier to an expansion of industrialization-the key to economic stability and a high standard of living throughout the world. Especially in countries with a developing economy like India, a less costly power-production method is vital to meet future requirements. To remedy this situation, United States scientists are busy developing several new types of devices for conversion of energy directly into electric power. Each of the devices is small, silent, has no moving parts and is much less expensive to make, operate and service than the conventional generating equipment. Tests have indicated that the new devices may equal or exceed the efficiency of present-day turbine generators. In fact it is considered that "direct conversion" may ultimately revolutionize powerproduction methods, yielding benefits that can be shared by people everywhere.
An important component. of a thermionic converter, right, is the small tube of cesium gas. When a wire, called an emiller, is heated in the top of the tube, the cesium gas increases the flow of electrons that are boiled out of the wire and promotes collection of the electrons by an adjacent colder surface, called a collector. ThomasA. Edison. famous U.S. inventor, discovered the boiling principle, which is the basis of all electron tubes, including those used in radio. A small electric fan, below, can be operatedby the electricity generated when a flame is applied to a thermionic converter approximately one inch in diameter.
One of the advantages of direct-conversion devices is their simplicity. In design and operation, they represent a radical departure from conventional generating equipment, which uses heat to make steam to drive an engine which, in turn, operates an electrical generator or dynamo. The new devices eliminate the need for all this intermediate machinery, with its high initial cost and continuing expense for operation and maintenance. Of the many types of direct-conversion devices now under investigation, the four most promising are the thermionic converter, the fuel cell and thenuoelectric and magneto hydrodynamic (MHD) generators. Thermionic converters and thermoelectric generators, which produce power by "boiling" electrons out of hot metal and various other materials that conduct energy, can utilize any source of heat-eoal, oil, atomic or solar energy. Fuel cells convert the energy of a chemical reaction into electricity. MHD generators produce power by passing an extremely hot ionized gas through a magnetic field. Fuel cells operate independently of any source of heat and can be easily constructed in various sizes. They have no moving parts and require hardly any care or -maintenance. They also provide greater efficiency-as much as 60 to 80 per cent-compared with about 40 per cent for conventional power generators. Inside the cell are two
span
March /96/
45
metal electrodes, one positive and the other negative. An electrolyte-a material which is a conductor of electric current-serves as the connecting medium between the two electrodes, and two kinds of fuel-an oxidizing agent and a reducing agent-are used. There is also a catalyst to promote reaction among these ingredients. In the thermionic converter the electrical process takes place in a tube of glass containing two electrodes which are maintained at high but widely different temperatures. Application of heat to one of the electrodes results in electrons being emitted and collected by the adjacent cooler electrode, which produces a stream of electric current. A series of tests on thermionic converters is now being carried out in the United States. Of particular interest is one in which the device is being tested in an atomic reactor. In this case the energy resulting from fission in the reactor is converted directly into electricity. This experiment has great possibilities in application of a nuclear-thermionic system for producing both space and land-based power. Installed in a space vehicle, such a system could provide all the power needed to operate for a full year. The thermo-electron engine has been developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It operates
Dr. L. W. Niedrach, left, and Dr. W. T. Grubb watch the fuel cell developed by them spin a miniature propeller. The plastic cell uses hydrogen, contained in the balloon at centre, as a fuel. The hydrogen reacts with oxygen in the air to produce electricity. Water is the by-product of this fuel cell.
An atomic reactor called SNAP-IO, weighing only two hundred pounds, has been successfully testedfor space vehicle use. It contains a thermoelectric generator, which operates much like a thermionic converter, using ceramic elements instead of metal. The reactor's two units, one above the scientist, one held by him, achieve a sustained chain reaction when brought together by remote control.
A scientist inspects a cluster of thermionic converters capable of transforming the sun's energy directly into electricity. Combined into a power system, this /lull/bel' of the converters, totalling twenty pounds in weight, would produce forty-one watts of electric power, an Oiltput equivalent to one thousand batteries like that shown and having a total weight of fifteen thousand pOl/nds.
on the principle that if two metal plates, one hot and the other cold, are placed side by side inside a vacuum tube, electrons travel from the hot plate to the cold and produce electricity. On the basis of its efficiency, the thermoelectron engine is expected to compete successfully with small generators now in use, many of which have low operating efficiencies. Yet another type of apparatus, known as a magnetohydrodynamic generator, utilizes thermoelectric ceramic material, known as a mixed valence oxide, instead of metal. It produces power by passing an extremely hot ionized gas through a magnetic field. When heat is applied to one end of a pellet of the ceramic material, electricity flows from the cool end of the pellet. Although direct-conversion devices still are considered experimental, the U.S. effort to perfect them has gained great momentum within the last two years. This research has been spurred by the need for a small, lightweight, efficient "package" to power instruments in space vehicles.For earth use too, a variety of equipment has been built and tested. The electricity produced by this equipment has proved sufficient for lighting purposes and for operation of vehicles and small machines. Following each advance, scientists use their newly acquired
knowledge to design and construct conversion devices.
improved direct-
Each device has certain advantages that recommend its use for specific purposes. Ultimately, one device may prove best for propulsion of vehicles, another for operation of factory machines and one or a combination of two or more for the production of electricity by large central power stations. The choice of a proper device also may depend upon the geographical area to be served. Where fossil fuels are scarce and costly, a device that utilizes solar, chemical or atomic energy may be the best choice. Where conventional fuels are more plentiful, power plants of the future may be equipped with a thermionic, thermoelectric or magnetohydrodynamic device or a combination of the devices. Such plants would be less massive and costly than today's structures and ultimately might be more efficient power-producers. Practical application of these revolutionary developments represents the main goal of many U.S. laboratories. Scientists engaged in this research are now confident of success in finding the answer to mankind's electric power problem. The question they now ask is not whether direct conversion will become practical on a massive scale, but when .â&#x20AC;˘